My Big Fat Greek Survey

Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou now knows what we’ve known all along: An online poll conducted for a private foundation he chairs found that there’s no better place for environmental news than on the Internet. The poll on the environment, involving more than 25,000 respondents in 175 countries, was launched at last month’s World Summit on Sustainable Development in the spirit of the first direct democracy, developed in Greece 2,500 years ago. Thirty-percent of respondents said the web was the best source of enviro news, while support for newspapers and TV came in even, at 17 percent each. The poll, which was promoted online by the BBC, AOL/Time Warner, and Microsoft, also found that twice as many people chose the environment as their top concern than those who selected terrorism; that changing “people’s behavior” was more likely to improve things than hiking taxes; that 71 percent of respondents were unhappy with the state of the world; and that European respondents were the most pessimistic.